death is all you cradle
by Ivory Muse
Summary: Telemachus grows up bitterly, so bitterly.
.i.

Tell me about Father again, Telemachus demands. His mother knows many stories, Athena springing from Lord Zeus's head and Hera sending a gadfly to sting Io and the gods overthrowing Cronus, but the one that has to do with his very own father is by far the best.

You know it by heart, Mother chides, but sets aside her spindle anyway. There was once— no, there is a wicked prince of Troy named Paris, who thought that he could have anything he wanted, even if it already belonged to someone else. He desired the wife of King Menelaus, so he took her home with him. Now your father and the other Greek men are sieging Troy to return her.

Does she want to go home?

I don't think it matters what she wants.

.ii.

(He pretends to remember him, sometimes, but the immovable truth is that he is only pretending. Odysseus sailed into a far-off mist when he was a year old, and through the haze of infant memory, he cannot recall if his mother wept or if his father had even looked back at him as he left.)

.iii.

His mother claims that his father will return when the war ends and he believes her, because when he is ten she is everything to him, more constant than the sun and stars— except Helen is spirited home to Menelaus and Telemachus sneaks out from the palace to watch ships unload, sees countless stragglers hobble away with unfocused gazes but none who ever turn up at his hearth. He imagines, stupidly, that he will recognize the sharp jaw and fierce eyes of his sire on sight, the same features he pores over for hours in the mirror. He imagines, stupidly, that Father might recognize him. He imagines a lot of things stupidly, the boundaries of dream twisting into reality as his heart beats a violent tattoo against his throat.

A year goes by. Mother gives endless tribute to Athena, and the house reeks of smoke day in and day out from her burnt offerings. Another year passes. Mother's eyes sink deep into her face, her posture hunched by an ineffable dolor— and Telemachus's tongue twists futilely when he tries to comfort her.

He wonders how it's possible to miss someone you've never laid eyes on, and loathe them at the same time. False hope hangs like rotten fruit in his mouth.

.iv.

He's twelve when strange men first begin to hang around the palace.

The suitors seem to find being kind to him a great jape, plying the gangly boy with honeyed candy and wooden playthings, but the sweets are cloying and sticky on his hands as he sees one push aside his mother's veil, the toy swords so very useless as another's gaze lingers upon her still-firm breasts. They creep in like an infestation, a few at first, more and more multiplying as the years roll on. Ants in a hive, spreading their cloaks on _Father's_ chairs, roasting _Father's_ sheep every night. Leering at _Father's_ wife.

Soon, he stops smiling whenever they pat him on the head. Soon, they stop saying, how sweet a boy you are, and start saying, you're almost a man, Telemachus, and he does not trust the way their cold eyes glint.

.v.

Your father was clever, Mother tells him. Always full of tricks.

Telemachus tries to come up with tricks to drive out the invaders, except he doesn't get very far. They are an amorphous enemy, worse than a hydra— new faces and new oily voices every time he turns around— while he is one small boy, who feels increasingly like an unwanted guest in his own father's house. He can't figure out how to poison all of them at once, or slay a hundred men with a sword too big and too heavy for him to bear.

Mother says that she will marry when she finishes Grandfather's shroud.

.vi.

His mother unravels his grandfather's burial shroud like one of the Fates. _Snip_ , and she holds out hope for another day. _Snip_ , and she sends Athena a silent prayer. _Snip_ , and she will not be a second Helen of Troy.

Go back to bed, she orders him when he discovers her duplicity, cheeks flushed, but he is not a child anymore.

I won't tell, he promises. Do you do this every night?

She looks down at her hands. He never wanted to leave, she finally says. He loved us. When Menelaus's emissary tried to take him, he pretended to be mad— yoked an ass and an ox together and plowed a whole field with it.

Telemachus is seized by the sudden desire to laugh, but this isn't funny. Failure rarely is. What happened?

His mother makes a trembling fist. Palamedes found you and put you down in the plow's path— and he dodged. Of course he dodged.

(It's not his fault. Really, it isn't. He was a year old, gurgling and helpless and flat on his back— and no father would run his son over.)

He vomits instead of crying. His father's schemes could not save this family, and neither will theirs.

.vii.

At twenty, nothing has gone the way he wished when Mentes comes to visit, tells him to cast the suitors out once and for all. He is as impotent as ever, stewing in his own resentment while his father's memory is desecrated, and all of his mother's plots have gone to seed. Pettily, he lashes out at her grief, her useless weeping and wailing and protests at the bards' songs. He can't bring himself to regret his sharp tongue, his demands that she let him deal with the men himself.

When he holds an assembly, curses their impasse when honorable men would ask Icarius for her hand, they laugh. Call her a seductress, toying with all and committing to none. Perhaps she should return to her father, they say through mocking smiles. Perhaps we should stay in the house while he makes the decision.

He commands the gods to smite them. They laugh some more.

They won't be laughing much longer, he swears by the river Styx.

.viii.

He sails away to Pylos, to Sparta. To hunt for any scrap of news— a sighting, a corpse.

He is a man, now. He wonders if his father will be proud.


End file.
